Army unit to mature electromagnetic deception tools

An armored unit is poised to advance electromagnetic deception capabilities and techniques for the Army during a rotation in Germany.

1st Armored Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division is in Hohenfels, Germany, as part of Combined Resolve 25-02, a U.S., NATO and multi-partner exercise focusing on interoperability, that’s slated to take place from May to June. That unit has been designated as a so-called “transforming-in-contact” unit. That Army concept aims to speed up how the service buys technologies and designs its forces by injecting emerging capabilities into units and letting them experiment with them during exercises and deployments.

The unit has conducted four transforming-in-contact events to date — to include activities at home station and a rotation at the National Training Center at Fort Irwin, California, last year where they encounter a full force-on-force conflict against an opposing enemy.

During that event, 1st Brigade began testing out tactics and technologies for electromagnetic deception to trick the enemy into thinking its forces were in one place, even though they were actually in another location. They recorded what the electronic emissions of their command posts looked like and played those recordings back on the battlefield for the opposing force.

“Our first iteration with the deception command post out here at NTC we had great effects, where the OPFOR attacked it. At NTC, I did not have to move my brigade command post once because of enemy indirect fire, enemy contact,” Col. Jim Armstrong, 1st Armored Brigade Combat Team, 3rd Infantry Division commander, told reporters this week.

The unit placed those signatures in locations where personnel thought the enemy would look for a command post, played the signatures and put the real command posts somewhere else.

The opposing force attacked the fake command post, revealing its own position and making it vulnerable to attack.

One of the biggest lessons from Russia’s incursions into Ukraine — from 2014 to its latest invasion — is how units can be located and targeted with kinetic munitions solely based on their emissions within the electromagnetic spectrum.

In addition to pushing units to reduce their overall signatures, the Army is pursing technologies that will allow them to deceive the enemy and even hide in plain sight.

“Commanders must be able to see themselves to control their emissions and defeat the enemy’s ability to sense, identify, locate, and target them. This is critically important when observations from current conflicts around the world show there are eight minutes from identification in the EMS to artillery impacting on the detected location of said emission,” the Army’s Multidomain Operations Range Guide states.

That effort is a partnership between the Cyber Center of Excellence and Intelligence Center of Excellence to inform how units conduct electromagnetic spectrum training at combat training centers and home stations.

In many cases, it is back to the future for the Army in electromagnetic spectrum operations as a whole — having divested much of its gear and tactics following the Cold War — and decoys especially. The service is looking to regrow that tradecraft and expertise as adversaries view electronic warfare as an essential tool for gaining and maintaining information superiority.

“Our adversaries employ world-class EW forces that support denial and deception operations and allow identification, interception, disruption, and, in combination with traditional fires, destruction of adversary command, control, communications, and intelligence capabilities,” the Multidomain Operations Range Guide states. “Near peers have fielded a wide range of ground-based EW systems to counter GPS, tactical communications, satellite communications, and radars. Additionally, their EW fuse with cyber operations enables their forces to corrupt and disable computers and networked systems as well as disrupt use of the EMS. Our adversaries aspire to develop and field a full spectrum of EW capabilities to counter Western Command, Control, Communications, Computers Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (C4ISR) and weapons guidance systems.”

The Army has tested other systems in the past capable of replicating the service’s assets — such as company to division level radio frequency signatures — to confuse and deceive enemy signals collection.

Those tools were able to collect the signals and signature profile of a command post — or anything that emits — and copy it to rebroadcast as a decoy. Some of the systems can be deployed to mimic a command post so the enemy doesn’t know exactly where the command post is or which one is the real command post.

Other units around the Army and as part of their transforming-in-contact rotations have sought to use electromagnetic deception, albeit in different ways depending on the enemy they faced or the terrain they were in.

2nd Brigade, 101st Airborne Division last year strapped $30 raspberry pi’s to small drones and used them as electronic decoys against its enemy, to great effect, according to after-action briefs.

However, that wasn’t necessarily a tactic that would work for 3rd Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, which conducted its rotation in January at Hohenfels as part of the last Combined Resolve event. The opposing force it faced would typically confirm electromagnetic detection with visual confirmation. That meant that in contrast to the setup for the 101st, where the enemy would simply detect the signal and fire upon it, if a signal of interest was discovered the opposing force would have to send a scout or a drone to validate that there were physical assets there.

Understanding that, 3rd Brigade paired inflatable M777 howitzers with its decoys, providing the physical evidence needed to deceive the enemy.

Following its National Training Center rotation, 1st Brigade, as well as 3rd Infantry Division as a whole, will be using its rotation in Hohenfels and Combined Resolve to build on operations using electronic deception designed to replicate EMS emissions, according to a spokesperson.

1st Brigade will be the first armored transforming-in-contact unit to participate in Combined Resolve.

The first iteration of transforming-in-contact, TiC 1.0, featured three light brigades. TiC 2.0 is focused on armored formations and divisions as a whole — to include enabling units such as artillery and air cavalry brigades as well as Multi-Domain Task Forces, some Army special operations units and National Guard units.

The division spokesperson declined to provide specific details regarding the deception capability for security reasons, but noted the decoy command post has both a physical and an electromagnetic spectrum component.

“There are 9 doctrinal forms of contact (visual, direct, indirect, non-hostile, obstacles, aircraft, [Chemical, Biological, Radiological, and Nuclear], and electronic) and the deception command post is designed to mimic as many of them as possible,” they said.